This blog is part of a series exploring the technologies and principles shaping the future of simulation. Simulation is a broad word. Perhaps too broad. Depending on who you ask, it can mean a desktop trainer, a fixed-base simulator, a full flight simulator, mission rehearsal, or a test environment for future systems. These are all simulations, but they are built differently and serve different use cases. What they have in common is complexity and the need for precision. Effective flight s...

Anthropic publish the system prompts for their Claude consumer applications ( Claude.ai and the Claude mobile apps - sadly not for Claude Cowork or Claude Code). I love that they do this, and that they share not just the current prompts but historic changes to their prompts as well. They used to keep all of the prompts on a single page, but when I checked today I noticed they had re-arranged those prompts into an index page and then a page per model - here's the page for Haiku 4.5 fo...

Fortunately it hasn’t been modified since last time. I’d hate to have to learn a new spoon interface. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-09-02. Fortunately it hasn’t been modified since last time. I’d hate to have to learn a new spoon interface. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-09-02. Fortunately it hasn’t been modified since last time. I’d hate to have to learn a new spoon interface. hasn’t been modified By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-09-02. Ruben Schade

Exploring the performance of byte-pair encoding by optimizing a GPT-2 tokenizer. Exploring the performance of byte-pair encoding by optimizing a GPT-2 tokenizer.

About a year ago, I was offered a presentation slot at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin. I rarely take speaking engagements, especially international ones, but this one arrived at just the right time, the right place, and with the right person – I said yes, on the contingency that Ben Dumke-von der Ehe joins me in the presentation. Ben is an early community hire at Stack Overflow who lives in Berlin. We both had something important we wanted to talk about, with slightly diffe...

Our Moon as seen by the Galileo spacecraft when it flew past on December 7, 1992. Image: NASA Where did our Moon come from? The origin of Earth’s cosmic companion is a fundamental question in planetary science. From Galileo’s first telescopic observations of the Moon to humans walking on its surface, our understanding of its origins has come a long way. Yet it’s far from complete. Over the decades, scientists have proposed multiple hypotheses to attempt explaining how the Moon came to...

Cancelation Terminology Aug 31, 2026 A short note explaining the difference between synchronous cancelation, asynchronous cancelation, and graceful shutdown. I am not too attached to these specific three terms , but I want to call your attention to the three things behind them, which are important not to confuse with each other. synchronous cancelation is an (often implicit) control flow structure. It unwinds the stack and looks like this: task. cancel (); // The task will...

Spacelab was a reusable laboratory that could be carried in the Space Shuttle's cargo bay, providing lab space for astronauts and experiments. 1 Because Spacelab was a European project, it used a French-built minicomputer, the Mitra 125 MS, 2 rather than the Shuttle's main computers, IBM-built AP-101 systems. For storage, the Spacelab computer contained 128 kilobytes of RAM. Rather than silicon memory, the computer used magnetic core memory, with each bit stored in a tiny ferrite ring. In this...

Giles Edwards-Alexander reports that during an experiment to see how productive a team could be using fully agentic engineering practices, the team accidentally prompted the agents into creating a blackboard coordination system inside the git repository. more… Giles Edwards-Alexander reports that during an experiment to see how productive a team could be using fully agentic engineering practices, the team accidentally prompted the agents into creati...

Half of all US job postings now name a salary. 50.4% of US postings on Indeed carried explicit wage or salary information in July 2026, the highest monthly reading in a series that starts in January 2020. This page collects salary transparency statistics by country, sector and law, plus what employers and applicants report doing about it. Every figure carries its measurement and period. Key Salary Transparency Statistics 50.4% of US job postings on Indeed contained explicit pay informati...

Ben Brubaker has a new Quanta essay Does Computer Science Need Computers ?  Despite the title (and authors generally don't choose their titles), Brubaker's essay really addresses the question as to whether computer science is about computers. He starts with Dijkstra's apocryphal quote "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." This is the wrong analogy: computers are not the telescopes, they are the stars. You just have to use a broad definition of comput...

After the IndieWeb Zine Pop Up in May, I decided that I wanted to make a zine. I had already made a zine before, Quiet Edinburgh, but the zine was more of a booklet. After the meetup, I started feeling inspired. I wanted to make a tiny paper zine, one that I could fit in my pocket. The idea lay in the back of my mind for a few months. Occasionally, I would think to myself I should make a zine. Earlier this week, I had an idea for one: a collection of Taylor Swift quotes that I like. I let the...

I started writing Logic for Programmers because there weren’t any good resources on logic for, uh, programmers. Now that the book’s out, the new problem is that there aren’t any good free resources on logic for programmers. So, to solve that problem (and maybe hype the book a little), I converted the second chapter of LfP into a blog post. All footnotes are editorial comments not present in the book. I started writing Logic for Programmers because there weren’t any good resources on log...

There’s a widespread belief that artificial superintelligence (ASI) is inevitable. In this post, I argue that this is false, and believing it is upstream of a lot of bad discourse. Why do people believe it? It’s easy to believe. Samuel Butler , already in 1863, observed that machines are improving faster than humans are improving. Today, AI systems are gaining capabilities much faster than humans: in five years we went from systems that can barely string together a sentence to auto...

This arrived out of the blue in today’s mail: As I wrote when I received the original award , I am very honored, but wish I’d had more impact on how software engineering is taught and how software engineering researchers interact with practitioners. Having just finished packing my daughter’s belongings into a truck so that she can move back to university, I’m going to spend the evening thinking about roads not taken… This arrived out of the blue in today’s mail: ...

Morning in the Tropics by Frederic Edwin Church, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at sinking London homes, US magnesium manufacturing, the World Humanoid Robot games, catastrophic flooding in Nepal, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housing and Cities New home sales are down 6.3% year over year. [ C...

No larger than the head of a match, Potamopyrgus antipodarum doesn’t look very impressive. Few people visiting New Zealand’s Lake Alexandrina even notice the tiny gastropods littering the shores. The snail’s diminutive size, however, conceals a massive secret. Sometime in the recent past, its genome doubled. Instead of having two sets of chromosomes and two copies of every gene… Source No larger than the head of a match, Potamopyrgus antipodarum doesn’t look very impressive. Few peo...

I've recently switched to Gnome's default apps for email etc. So instead of #Thunderbird doing all the things, I have Geary, Calendar, and Contacts. Most of the time I only need email, so it's nice having a much simplified UX. I also like how integrated into Gnome they all are. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leav...

Cultivation of the Vines, Henri Martin Kudzu is a plant that was once introduced from East Asia to the eastern United States as a way to combat soil erosion. But, kudzu, once introduced, grows aggressively and can overtake sidewalks, houses, foundations, and even trees. The only way to kill kudzu is to prune it aggressively, as a concentrated strategy enacted together by all the people who live near where the kudzu grows. You know where I’m going with this. An app feature, once...

“Workslop” is when your colleagues or bosses communicate with you by pasting big chunks of AI-generated text. The core problem with workslop is that the effort involved is asymmetrical , like a denial-of-service attack : it takes almost no effort to produce text with AI, but it still costs effort to read 1 . Here are some ways to protect yourself. If you have enough authority or social capital, you can and should simply tell them “hey, don’t do that” (for instance, if you’re a ...

In building an NTP time demo on old Macs for VCF Midwest , I came across RFC 867 and RFC 868 , for the 'Daytime' and 'Time' Protocols, respectively. My first exposure to any form of network time was when I upgraded from a used PowerBook 180c to my first 'new' computer, a Power Mac G3, in 2000. With the introduction of Mac OS 8.5, Apple added a 'Network Time Server' option in the Date & Time Control Panel. In building an NTP time demo on old Macs for VCF Midwest , I came across RFC ...

What's up on the small web? August 2026 roundup 2026-08-30 12:15 Summer rolls on, and the small web had a busy month: a major Lagrange release, a new graphical client for Android and desktop, terminal tools crossing v2.0, and some good community debates. Here is a roundup of what happened on the small web, the smolnet, and around the Gemini protocol in August 2026. Geminispace past 5,000 known capsules On August 24, Lupa (Stéphane Bortzmeyer's Gemini crawler) published a fresh snapshot:...

JSON is a standard format for data interchange. It is effectively a tiny subset of JavaScript made of objects and arrays. It looks as follows {"key":1, "text":[1.0,2.0]} . Many programming languages include a JSON library in their standard libraries: C#, Go, Java (soon), Python, JavaScript, etc. The Go implementation is convenient, but not especially fast. Go 1.27 makes a new JSON package ( encoding/json/v2 ) available by default in its standard library. The two APIs look almost the same: ...